Within those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered

In the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a particular vision stayed with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent detonations. The digital network was entirely cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to move language across cultures, and the ethics and worries of taking on another’s perspective. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding reference books, rare books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: sudden terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and references that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A image spread on social media of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning devastation into art, death into lines, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to disappear.